All shall have prizes: one for the composer’s pupil

william osborne says:

It’s interesting the degree to which the Germans embraced the ideals of American experimentalism (Cowell, Partch, Cage, Oliveros, Ruggles, Feldman, Varese, etc.) They established that all sound could serve as the material of music, which could be presented even in aleatoric forms independent of the artist’s will. Due to the historical context, this had a profound effect. War ravaged Europeans knew that the Third Reich was, in part, a manifestation of their cultural values. The American experimentalists offered a new world, an emancipation of sound freed from a genocidal past.

This ethos was taken up by the editors of Musik Texte, Germany’s most influential new music magazine. Three of the editors also had important positions in the German public radio system in Frankfurt, Cologne, and Munich. Cologne, where the magazine had its base, became the center of new music in West Germany. A Germanized ethos of American experimentalism became the new orthodoxy that ran in tandem with the other dominant school of thought, serialism and its stylistic relatives.

As professor at the Musikhochschule in Cologne, Kagel gained an outsized influence on the future of Germany’s new music world. A sort of preciously arty sound art became a doctrinaire cultural force.

Another advantage was that this sort of elitist experimentalism stood as a strong riposte to the East Block’s social realism. In one gesture, both fascism and communism could be rejected.

The irony is that the Herrenvolkish ethos that surrounded German music and its reception, and still does, wasn’t the foundational problem. It was more fundamental cultural factors such as absolutism, a tendency toward cultural orthodoxy, nationalism, the concept of difficult art as a kind of protestant edification of the soul, the idea that art is a kind of arcane secret knowledge the elite pass off to the unknowing masses, the identifier of art as a signifier of cultural superiority, a kind of precious and obscure sensitivity symbolizing social and intellectual refinement.

These characteristics are often couched behind a hip veil of humor, irreverence, and rebellion to give it a Volkish rather than Herrenvolkish appearance, but in the end both end up in about the same place. It also creates a nice appearance of cosmopolitanism.

The Munich Biennale is an interesting measure of these changes. It was conceived and built to prominence by Hans Werner Henze, an earlier type of modernist who had a strong sensibility for finding young composers with fairly solid compositional skills. Manos is now the Co-Director of the Biennale and the programming has moved toward a Germanized version of American experimentalism. Sound art, works similar to installations, and updated forms of happenings are more the style. It’s a bit dated, and unfortunately, when it comes to genuinely effective music theater, one senses conceptualism masking a lack of ability. Still, it is all so precious and refined few sense the problems, and those who do are reluctant to say anything since it challenges a dogmatic and all-powerful status quo in Germany’s new music world.